What A Day!

Yesterday started off pretty normal...I got Ella up and while nursing her the boys came into our room. The night before the boys had been playing with the metal parts from this...

a bed rail for Jack's bed. We used to have it up but then I took it apart to wash it and never put it back together. The metal skeleton comes apart so the mesh part comes off. Anyways the boys had been using those metal pipes as canes...think Latso from Toy Story 3!

After I nursed Ella I put her down and went into the bathroom to get something. When I came out I saw the tail end of her falling on the ground....holding one of the pipes. She was crying of course, but I thought it was more from bumping her head when she fell. That's when I noticed the blood...not a lot just a little. We tried to look in her mouth and we could see that the pipe had hit the upper right part of her gums, but it didn't look that bad. I figured she wouldn't want to eat anything other than baby food for breakfast, but oh no...she was hungry! Don't stand between a girl and her food. She took a great morning nap...woke up ate lunch and nursed again. That's when I noticed it had started bleeding again. It got me concerned so I called the dentist.

We had dentist appts for all 3 of the kids scheduled for Friday anyways, but after describing what happened the nurse was able to get us in later in the afternoon on Thursday instead. So I took Ella up for her appt while Michael stayed home so the boys could nap.

This was Ella's first time at the dentist so of course I took pictures. She let the hygienist clean her teeth and then we tried to get an x-ray, but she wasn't having it.


While waiting for the Dentist to come check her out I sat her in the chair and got some cute pictures. Seriously she has a major mouth wound and she's still happy! Once the dentist got a good look at how bad it really was he didn't feel comfortable trying to fix it. He didn't have his anesthesiologist there either. So he told us to head to a hospital. Since I was right in Burien I decided to just go to Highline since it was closest.



The Highline ER is beautiful and it wasn't busy at all. We got right in! Thank goodness! Ella of course had her ID bracelet off in record time.


After looking over the wound they decided it needed to be stitched up. They had me get her undressed and then we waited for them to get set up. Since she's not even a year old there was no way they could just do a local anesthetic so they had to give her Ketamine which is what they use to do conscience sedation at the dentist office. They did end up hooking her up to oxygen and they also monitored her heartbeat and her blood pressure.

They didn't do an IV they just gave her a shot which she cried about and then she fought the sedation for a while, but here she is once she gave in and relaxed. The nice thing about this is she couldn't feel anything, she wasn't aware of what they were doing and the best thing is she won't remember it.

Below is a picture of them working on her so if you can't handle that stuff you might want to scroll down further without looking.

Here they are reattaching her gum to the top of her mouth. This picture is actually pretty tame. It looked tons worse than this in person. A big chunk of her gum was involved and it moved over and made a flap. It wasn't dangling from her mouth, but just about. You know how you have teeth up under your gums waiting to come out. Well Ella's gums were cut into right up to those teeth...it was like her teeth got scalped!

Towards the end of the procedure...which didn't work because gum tissue is really soft and the stitches kept tearing...she had to be restrained because she was starting to come out of the anesthesia.

Her cute little toes! She did really well considering! Coming out from the meds was the worst though. They turned down the lights and got the room as quiet as they could...I guess light and noise make it worse. She still cried and thrashed around in my arms for about 40 minutes. I tried to comfort her, but she wasn't really there yet. When she finally came too it was like nothing had happened. Before she started really coming out of it was when the doctor came in and said they thought she needed to be seen by a pediatric dentist at Children's Hospital and they were arranging for a transport via ambulance.

They said the safest way to transport her was in her own car seat so I ran down and got it for her. She was wide awake by this time and as happy as can be. The EMT guys were great!

Getting loaded up....who would have thought that with two older brothers she'd be the first one to take a trip in an ambulance!

What else do you do when you have a mouth injury....chew on a hard phone toy! She never fell asleep nor did she cry during the transfer. I was worried how much the trip was going to cost since I've heard ambulance rides can be VERY expensive. I was talking to Michael on the phone and one of the EMT guys said we would be fine since we have Medical Coupon for the kids. It's totally covered. Praise God! I guess a normal ride can cost $1500!!

At Children's she had more doctor's look in her mouth. They were pretty sure that she had broken one of her molars that are still up inside of her gums so they called in the specialty dentist to check her out. Around this time Michael got to the hospital...he had to call my parents so they could come watch the boys for us. When the dentist came we went over to the dentistry part of the hospital and we all had to hold her down so they could get an x-ray. Then while that was developing we all had to hold her down again and they did a VERY thorough exam. It's was awful! She was screaming and pulling so hard. After checking it out and confirming with the x-rays she did not in fact break her molar like they had thought in the ER. Also it looks like her teeth that are still up in the gums weren't effected at all. I was so worried that they would be damaged and not come in correctly.

The dentists then call another doctor and consulted with him and they really thought it was best to not put her through another procedure since the first one failed. The mouth is really an amazing thing and since the gum was a big chunk it was actually suction cupping to the top of the mouth on it's own. So they wanted to see if it would heal on it's own.

After Michael had gotten to the hospital they brought in a pump for me to use. I hadn't fed Ella since 12:30 and it was 8pm! They didn't want me to feed her just in case she needed to have surgery. Finally after they decided to not do surgery she was able to eat. It was after 10pm so you'd think she would gobble a bottle down. WRONG! She just chewed on the nipple! Seriously...she has NEVER taken a bottle and I really doubt she ever will. So I nursed her, but there wasn't much there. Then the nurse came in to give her some Motrin in one of those syringe things and I asked if I could use it to give her milk and she took my milk that way. Silly girl!

We finally got discharged at 11pm and were on the way home! By this time Ella had been awake since 3:10pm when I woke her up from her afternoon nap to take her to the dentist. I think she fell asleep in the car, but she woke up once we got home. I nursed her again and she got to bed at midnight. She didn't wake up until 7:45 to nurse and then she ate some baby food and pretty much went right back to bed. So how is she doing today...

She's a happy girl!

She's been a little more tired today and I've had to give her Tylenol twice...she has gotten mad at me because they don't want me to let her eat anything solid only baby food. She loves her food! This afternoon I take her back to the dentist up by Children's so they can check it out and make sure it is in fact healing on it's own. They also want to make sure it isn't getting infected. They and we didn't want them to prescribe an antibiotic unless absolutely necessary. So we'll see what they say. I sure hope it's healing!